Looking Ahead: An Interview with Michael A. Marletta

On January 1, Michael
A. Marletta took office as president and CEO of The Scripps Research Institute.
Here, he speaks with Mika Ono of News&Views about topics including his background, priorities, and vision for the
future.

What led you to The
Scripps Research Institute?

Twenty years ago, Scripps offered me a position. I was at
the University of Michigan at the time. I thought long and hard about it, and
decided I still enjoyed the full spectrum of a complicated university with many
thousands of undergraduates. Just over 10 years ago, I moved to UC Berkeley. At
Berkeley, I served as chair of the chemistry department for five years and
found I enjoyed leading a complex and driven diverse group of people. A few
times over the years, Richard Lerner [former president] would say, “Look, if you
are ready to make a move…” I visited Scripps a number of times, and I’ve always
admired the place. So when this opportunity came along, I thought it was a long
shot but I applied.

What excites you about
the job as president?

I’m excited about the potential of learning how biology
works and applying that knowledge to medical problems—and that’s really being
excited about the mission of The Scripps Research Institute. Others at Scripps
are excited about that, too, and that’s great.

You’ve been here since
July. What are some of your first impressions of the institute?

The most encouraging thing I learned is that, in general,
the faculty and staff have an intense devotion to this place. I walked into
Beckman the other day and the security guard at the desk, Marcus Bilbee, and I
struck up a conversation, and it was clear he cares a lot. When the faculty
start to talk about what they have been able to discover here, it’s clear they
have an attachment. That has been deeper and more intense than I expected. That
is going to help us in the long run. No place is perfect. Scripps has its
challenges, areas for improvement. But if you feel strongly about the place
where you work, you are willing to help and be part of the solution.

What are the biggest
challenges you see?

There are financial pressures. Scripps is a soft-money
institution. One question I could ask in return is, “Why do faculty come to
Scripps?” They could stay in a university and, even with no research support,
collect nine months of salary for teaching. But for that, their days would be
broken up with all kinds of university responsibilities. I did those for many
years. Some of those are enjoyable, but sometimes they take you away from
research when you would rather sit in a lab talking to students about a
particular result. At Scripps, you can come in at the beginning of the day and
if somebody finds something unexpected or a big experiment works, you could
spend all day thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it… That never happens in a university
environment. Faculty come here because they can do unencumbered research. For
that, there’s the risk of raising money to fund the research you want to do.
Faculty also come and stay because of the infrastructure here—the very best in
equipment.

So we need to generate resources to keep that infrastructure
at the highest level. We need to generate resources to recruit the next
generation of new faculty. We need to have resources to keep our faculty who
will get offers from other places. While there are different issues in Florida,
in La Jolla the financial pressures are significant. We have had long-time
relationships with “big pharma” that are not going to be repeated in the
current environment. Florida is still in the growth phase, still with money
from the State of Florida, so there is empty space because we are still
recruiting principle investigators. We’re on track to meet the Florida
benchmarks.

All of this boils down to the fact that the biggest issue
facing us is how to move forward in a situation where the federal government
will not be the partner it has been in the past. That will put even more
pressure on us to raise internal funds. We’re looking at a combination of
philanthropy and a return on our investment in intellectual property [IP]. IP
is going to ramp up. Not having a first-rights agreement as we have had in the
past will make us look farther into the future for financial benefit from our
IP, but we will own all of what we discover here and that should be a direct
benefit to us.

Could you talk a
little more about philanthropy? Why should people give here versus elsewhere?

People give because there is something about what we are
doing that strikes a chord in them. Each of us can rattle off parents,
siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins who suffered from some disease. It’s just
inevitable. When disease strikes, we often like to do something about it. It’s
one of the common aspects of private giving here. Donors hear about what we’re
doing and want to support it. Of course, we have to tell them what we’re doing,
and I’m spending some of my time doing that. Sometimes what strikes a chord is
an individual they meet, say a faculty member working on a particular disease.
When they make a contribution, they have the opportunity to see that person be
successful, working on something they believe in or a disease they want to see
wiped out. So it’s often deeply personal. That’s why philanthropy is all about
relationships—listening to what potential donors find interesting and then showing
them we have the potential to make a major discovery that they can be a part
of.

Isn’t basic research
somewhat of a double-edged sword—you’re years away from medically applied
research, although the fundamental discovery may ultimately have a larger impact?

I actually don’t agree with that. Let’s use the recent
example of Jeff Kelly’s tafamidis [now approved in Europe for the
treatment of familial amyloid polyneuropathy]. At the heart of it, I’d say Jeff
probably has two passions. One is to come up with a drug that helps treat
disease. He’s just done that. But the other passion is for the science itself.
So Jeff’s driving force was understanding how proteins fold, and when they misfold
what happens—very basic, fundamental work, but also necessary to make a drug. Benlysta®
is the only treatment for lupus, a very complicated disease. Richard Lerner’s
antibodies are the technology that drug was based on. There was Humira® before
that. Humira® will soon be the largest selling drug in the world.

To me, Scripps represents the very best in fundamental
research coupled with looking outward for the translational piece, which takes
fundamental discovery and turns it into drugs. When I was at Michigan, in the
medical school’s biological chemistry department, the clinicians would say,
“You’re so far away from [the clinic].” It appeared more like that then,
because you made a fundamental discovery, you published it, and that was more
or less the end of it. But at Scripps, it’s not just about basic discovery, but
also what can you can do with it. That’s different. I tell donors what our
fundamental discoveries can do. I tell them we are about discovery—that’s what
we do—but we don’t let it rest there, and we’ve got examples to show it. Here,
basic research and potential applications go hand-in-hand.

Your own work has
bridged fundamental discovery and medical application.

We started a company. My father said I finally must have
done something important! We spent years trying to understand the remarkable finding
that a molecule such as nitric oxide, this toxic molecule, is regulating blood
pressure and is involved in learning, in memory. Everything in moderation; a
glass of wine is good, 10 is probably bad. It’s the same with a molecule like
nitric oxide. Biology has learned how to handle it. It’s extremely toxic, yet
we’re making it and using it in some important physiological processes. It just
turns out we don’t make very much of it. Over the years, we asked questions
about how biology handles such a toxic molecule to carry out these important
physiological processes. We then started to ask how biology tells the
difference between nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, and oxygen. Biology has to
look at all three and tell the difference from a chemical perspective, and it’s
not so easy. In figuring that out, we realized that we could use our
fundamental understanding to deliver nitric oxide or carbon monoxide or oxygen
to particular tissues, and there are good, practical reasons for wanting to do
all three. So we wrote some patents, and there’s a little company [Omniox]
that’s operating right now in San Francisco. Hopefully, it will be successful.

How did you get
interested in science in the first place?

I have a 16-year old. I watched him when he was a baby.
Every kid is a scientist. They are all trying to figure out the world—whether
they are lying on the floor and whacking at something or trying to figure out
where the ball is going to go when it rolls across the floor. I found it
interesting to watch him. I thought about myself and from my earliest memories,
I always wanted to know how things work. But the catalyzing moment was October
4, 1957, when I was six years old and the Soviets launched Sputnik. I was six,
so I was too young to be afraid. This was in upstate New York. It was pretty
cold as I remember it, an October night, and I put on a heavy jacket and went
out and stood on the front lawn of the little house we lived in and watched
Sputnik fly over. Even though I didn’t understand there was engineering and
science at the time, I became convinced that whatever that was I wanted to be a
part of it. Christmas was right around the corner, so I asked for a telescope.
Since I was six, I guess it would have been Santa who brought it to me. Then
the next year, I asked for a microscope and I got that. And the next year I
asked for a chemistry set, a Gilbert chemistry set, and I didn’t get that. My
father was worried I was going to blow up the house, although there was nothing
you can blow up with a Gilbert chemistry set. But by this time, it was maybe
1960 and you could still buy a lot of chemicals, which I did because I had a
paper route. I built my own lab and I almost did blow up the house… I was
always fascinated by the periodic table and the idea that everything on this
planet was composed of those elements, and you could mix and match them to make
things already in nature or make new things with properties nobody expected. I
thought that was it. Then I took a biology course and realized that the master
chemist is biology. Since then I’ve been walking between the two worlds.

Is it too early to ask
you your vision of Scripps?

It’s a little early, but people have asked. As I mentioned,
you have to have the best infrastructure possible. You’ve got really smart
people who already have great ideas. You need to recognize talent, keep the
best talent, and then basically get out of the way.

That said, I think that it would be important for Scripps to
engage in serious issues in human health. I would like us to work on some big
problems, like the combination of obesity and metabolic diseases like diabetes.
We already have people working in these areas, but there is some opportunity.
As enzymologists—I would describe myself as an enzymologist—we study one enzyme
in a test tube, one at a time. We understand a lot, but when you put that one
enzyme with a thousand others all working together in us, it doesn’t quite work
like it works in a test tube. So, in fact, we’re talking about metabolism, an
old moniker. When you think about the spectrum of metabolic diseases, they
include not only diabetes and aspects of obesity, but also cancer, which is now
being reinterpreted as something called the Warburg effect—oxygen consumption
by cancer cells. I would like us to be as good at metabolomics as we are at
proteomics—where we are one of the best in the world due to our investment in
talent and infrastructure. With infrastructure in metabolomics, not only can
our faculty take advantage of these resources, we’ll also be able to tackle
diseases that confront the Western world. If we don’t solve those problems, as
a society we’re going to have an albatross around our neck. We need to
understand the processes, and we need to do something about those diseases. So,
I see investment in that kind of infrastructure and then doing what I do best,
which is 1) taking advantage of it in my own research, and 2) getting out of
the way.

Are there any other
messages you want to get out there to employees, to donors, to faculty?

I mostly want people to know I’m excited. The more I learn
about Scripps, the more excited I am. Also, I’m going to work hard to make sure
that Scripps remains the kind of institution that it has been and moves forward
with new discoveries, but I need everybody’s help—faculty and staff—everybody.

Send comments to: press@scripps.edu

Michael A. Marletta took office as president and CEO of The Scripps Research Institute on January 1. (Photo by Dave Freeman, BioMedical Graphics.)